The analysis of neural systems leverages tools from many different fields. Drawing on techniques from the study of critical phenomena in statistical mechanics, several studies have reported signatures of criticality in neural systems, including power-law distributions, shape collapses, and optimized quantities under tuning. Independently, neural complexity-an information theoretic measure-has b...

Bone morphogenetic proteins (BMPs) have been shown to play a key role in controlling ectodermal cell fates by inducing epidermis at the expense of neural tissue during gastrulation. Here, we present evidence that the Xenopus POU class V transcription factor XOct-25 regulates ectodermal cell fate decisions by inhibiting the competence of ectodermal cells to respond to BMP during Xenopus embryoge...

The cranial neural crest and the cranial mesoderm are the source of tissues from which the bone and cartilage of the skull, face and jaws are constructed. The development of the cranial mesoderm is not well studied, which is inconsistent with its importance in craniofacial morphogenesis as a source of precursor tissue of the chondrocranium, muscles, vasculature and connective tissues, mechanica...

Injury to the peripheral nervous system (PNS) and central nervous system (CNS) may result in severe functional loss. Spontaneous regeneration is limited to small lesions within the injured PNS and is actively suppressed within the CNS. In this chapter we discuss the pathology and changes in the physiological environment following PNS/CNS injury. Several key factors such as the glial scar and in...

In comparative and developmental neuroanatomy one encounters questions regarding the deformation of neural tissue under stress. The motivation of this note is an observation (Barbas et al[1]) that at cortical folds or gyri, the layers of neural tissue show relative thickening or thinning of upper or deep layers. In general, the material properties of a slab of neural tissue are not known, and e...

The method of neural grafting is considered to be a very promising therapeutic strategy for the treatment of certain neurodegenerative disorders such as Parkinson's disease or Huntington's disease. During the last 15 years, clinical transplantation studies have been carried out worldwide in several hundreds of patients with Parkinson's disease. In these studies, primarily fetal mesencephalic ti...

Electrical stimulation is currently used to treat a wide range of cardiovascular, sensory and neurological diseases. Despite its success, there are significant limitations to its application, including incompatibility with magnetic resonance imaging, limited control of electric fields and decreased performance associated with tissue inflammation. Magnetic stimulation overcomes these limitations...

Biodegradable nanofibers produced by electrospinning represent a new class of promising scaffolds to support nerve regeneration. We begin with a brief discussion on the electrospinning of nanofibers and methods for controlling the structure, porosity, and alignment of the electrospun nanofibers. The methods include control of the nanoscale morphology and microscale alignment of the nanofibers, ...

Vertebrate and most invertebrate organisms interact with their environment through processes of adaptation and learning. Such processes are generally controlled by complex networks of nerve cells, or neurons, and their interactions. Neurons are characterized by all-or-none discharges—the spikes— and the time series corresponding to the sequences of the discharges—the spike trains — carry most o...

The use of biomaterials processed by the electrospinning technique has gained considerable interest for neural tissue engineering applications. The tissue engineering strategy is to facilitate the regrowth of nerves by combining an appropriate cell type with the electrospun scaffold. Electrospinning can generate fibrous meshes having fiber diameter dimensions at the nanoscale and these fibers c...